To the Lions

It doesn’t take long into writer/director David
Michôd’s debut feature, Australian crime film
Animal Kingdom, before you feel like you’re
being introduced to a potentially major new
filmmaker. The opening scene depicts a teenage
boy sitting slack on the couch of a disheveled
apartment living room, afternoon sun pouring through
the window behind him. He stares blankly at a
television where — rather pointedly — the game show
Deal or No Deal is on. Beside him is an older woman,
presumably his mother, slumped down, presumably
asleep. The image holds for several seconds until we
see a team of EMTs enter from behind. It’s then that
we learn his mother has overdosed on heroin. As the
medical workers tend to her, the young man stands
out of their way but can’t stop his gaze from wandering
back to the television.

This gradual move from mundane to tragic neatly
encapsulates the rest of the film. The young man,
Joshua Cody (James Frecheville), now an orphan,
is taken in by his estranged grandmother, who stays
close to her other children — three uncles who seem
to be involved in a variety of petty and not-so-petty
crimes. Darren (Luke Ford) is the youngest, uneasy
in the family “business” and seemingly a glimpse into
Joshua’s possible future. Craig (Sullivan Stapleton), a
tattooed drug dealer with crooked-cop connections, is
the most daring and physical of the brood. The eldest
brother, Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), is a sullen, shifty
figure, off his meds and in hiding. Non-family associate
Barry (fellow Aussie filmmaker Joel Edgerton, whose
own crime flick, The Square, had a brief Memphis run
earlier this year) seems to be the most grounded of the
crew. Hovering over them all is the Ma Barker-esque
grandmother, nicknamed Smurf and brought to life in
a memorably uneasy performance by Jacki Weaver.

We don’t see this clan in the commission of a crime
but hunkered down in the aftermath, and the first act
of violence we see isn’t perpetrated by a Cody but by
the cops trying to take them down. It’s the reckless
decision by an unstable Pope to retaliate that pulls
Joshua deeper into the family’s lawlessness. Joshua isn’t
so much welcomed into this extended family as put
to use. He’s accepted as an expendable commodity,
deployed as needed until he becomes a potential
problem. Gradually, the danger infecting the family
touches Joshua and begins to threaten others in his
orbit. Along the way, the film earns its metaphoric title,
as this clan definitely doesn’t mind devouring its young.
Animal Kingdom has its share of Scorsese-isms,
and these sometimes feel like overreach. The initially
innocent protagonist’s entry into a close-knit criminal
world, at first told with a soon-abandoned voiceover,
is reminiscent of Goodfellas (though Animal Kingdom
shouldn’t otherwise be saddled with that daunting
comparison).

And there are a couple of pop music cues here that
feel like Scorsese hand-me-downs via P.T. Anderson.
Air Supply’s power ballad “All Out of Love” is the ’80s
kitsch-pop repurposed to would-be chilly effect here.
Michôd’s camera pans across a flickering televised
video of the song to Joshua and his girlfriend (Laura
Wheelwright), sleeping entwined on the couch, finally
landing on the numbed visage of Pope. That we’ve seen
this before doesn’t matter. In Boogie Nights, Anderson
turned a compendium of borrowed bits into something
great. But Michôd doesn’t quite find the cinematic
alchemy here the way Anderson did with “Jesse’s Girl.”
But a few directorial flourishes aside, Animal
Kingdom purposefully lacks the flashiness of most
American crime films, a consequence of its refusal to
glorify its protagonists.

A comparison to another new film about an imperiled
group of robbers, Ben Affleck’s The Town, is instructive.
The Town is a generally terrific, Hollywood-style crime
thriller, but it’s overheated where Animal Kingdom is
grounded. There are many fewer gunshots in the entire
two hours of Michôd’s film than in just a few seconds of
one of The Town’s big set pieces, but every pulled trigger
comes with enormous consequences. And the crew of
crooks here are not charismatic or sympathetic. They are
dull, brutish, and frightened.

Animal Kingdom won the World Jury Dramatic Prize
(aka “best foreign film”) at the Sundance Film Festival
in January, and it’s easy to see why. If David Michôd
goes too far at times in pursuit of American icons, he’s
still produced an impressively realized debut feature
that suggests even better things could be ahead.